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Topic: A Nub's Journey into Elite Dangerous (Read 2470 times)

In theory using a HOTAS regularly should make the controls instinctive. I would say that is the case with my Thrustmaster Warthog now, with the exception of me confusing my Heatsink and Shield Cell switches. That said, I would probably use voice attack for those commands when using VR, just to eliminate errors.

The mass of your ship effects your stability when travelling through the jet cone of a neutron star to get a FSD boost. Bigger ships are more stable.I discovered this last night after my poor Asp got bounced around all over the place.

Advice is that smaller ships should enter nearer the end of the cone rather than closer to the star. This reduces turbulence and minimises the risk of getting thrown into the exclusion zone of the star.

I was in the Pleiades for the purposes of gaining access to an engineer who can modify my ship's thrusters to the max level, where I had my first encounters with the Thargoids.

The first was finding a crashed ship on a planet's surface and shuffling around that in my SRV to find the materials the engineer is looking for. This was a very eerie experience, as the still functioning parts of the ship give off a resonance that can generously be described as creepy. As the thargoid technology is, as far as we know, biotech, I was creeped out by the thought that what I might be scooping up and driving around was technically alive.

And watching me. Judging by the sensor scan I picked up as I neared the crashed ship.

The second encounter was in hyperspace travel between planets. As per the classic game, the Thargoids can interdict vessels in witchspace and pull them out of jump. They shut down my ship, scanned me and then wandered off for a think. I was sat in the dark for what seemed like forever, the ship getting cold, as the haunting resonance of the Thargoids pummeled my ears. The power came back on as the Thargoids moved away.

Whilst the Thargoids did that, I started by frame shift drive up and made moves to get the hell out of there. Whether it was my ship moving or the analysis of my scan revealing I had Thargoid tech on board, I don't know. What I do know is that they opened fire and I managed to jump with at least enough intact vessel to make a jump but, not much else.

The combination of sound effects, the unpredictable behaviour of the Thargoids (apparently they don't always attack and I don't know what prompted them in my case) and their tech, makes for one of the most "alien" experiences I've encountered in a computer game and a disturbing one at that. Hats off to Frontier Developments for this.

Oh yeah, the last patch added generation ships to the Elite Dangerous universe. Six have been found so far I think. Each of the ships have multiple data points from which their logs can be downloaded and listened to. They are fully voice acted and well done pieces which tell of the fate of these now derelict, giant, vessels. If you run into one of these, they're worth spending some time investigating.